Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) are calling on donor agencies and development partners to make effective functioning of district assemblies’ sub-structures a conditionality before they could grant any form of support to a developing country like Ghana.

This, they noted, would compel district assemblies in the country to implement the concept of decentralization, which they assessed was lagging behind and affecting good governance.

The CSOs including Community Development and Advocacy Centre (CODAC), Northern Patriots in Research and Advocacy (NORPRA) working in the areas of local governance and community development in the nine districts of the Upper East Region made the call at a forum in Bolgatanga to disseminate findings of assessment of the “functionality of District sub-structures”.

They indicated that apart from the Garu-Tempane and Bawku West districts which had all their sub-structures functioning, the sub-structures of the rest of the district assemblies in the region were not fully operating.

The CSOs, who carried out the research commissioned by Ibis Ghana, attributed the success story of the two districts to the fact that Ibis Ghana built the capacity of those assemblies and provided them with logistics under its “Public Participation in Local Governance (PPLG) project”.

“Most of the buildings meant for the substructures are old and some occupied by goats instead of staff. There are no staffs for the substructures.”

The stakeholders blamed the situation to the lack of strong political will, lack of motivation, funds, and logistics, inadequate training and supervision, poor turnout at meetings, little or no ability to carry out activities in communities.

Other dynamics for malfunctioning of the District Assembly structures included non-empowerment of councilors, inadequate communication between the District Assemblies and Town and Area councils.

The participants stressed that if donors and development partners made it one of their conditions when giving support to developing countries, it would compel the District Assemblies to make their substructures functional.

They also called on the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development to empower Assembly members by educating them on community entry and mobilization techniques.

Assembly members were encouraged to look for other sources of funding through proposal writing instead of relying solely on the District Assembly Common fund. They should use social and ceremonial platforms including meetings by houses of chiefs, churches, mosques, market squares among others to propagate their messages to their constituents.

“You need to be more innovative, proactive, creative in doing so”, Mr Bismark Ayorogo, President of NORPRA told the Assembly Members.

Mr Issahaku Bukari, the Programmes Manager of CODAC observed Ghana’s decentralization concept was the best in Africa leading to other countries adopting it to their benefit, yet Ghana was not implementing it effectively.

Participants noted that the research findings were not limited to only the Upper East Region but most of the districts across the country.